{"id":72,"date":"2005-07-27T23:57:14","date_gmt":"2005-07-27T22:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=72"},"modified":"2011-02-26T13:47:38","modified_gmt":"2011-02-26T12:47:38","slug":"4-start-itfinish-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=72","title":{"rendered":"PM#4 – Start it…finish it"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Dr.Neil Roodyn<\/a> says<\/a>, keep your task duration\/time down to a 30 minute average (which means your tasks can be anything from 5 minutes to 120 minutes in length, it’s the average we’re interested in).<\/p>\n

Just as important as the task duration, is the need to ensure that a task can be both started <\/em>and<\/strong> finished<\/em>. Long-running tasks do nothing for a person’s (read: developer) motivation and desire to focus on the project in hand. There’s little point asking a person to do any more if their in-basket\/work-basket is already overloaded with tasks that have been started, but not finished.<\/p>\n

I call this role Starter-Finisher, Dr. Meredith Belbin<\/a> calls it Completer-Finisher<\/a>. Either way, the job needs doing; starting can <\/em>be easy, which is perhaps why Belbin believes the role should focus towards the end of the task, i.e. the finish or completion.<\/p>\n

Completed\/Finished tasks elicit feedback, feedback drives quality, quality drives customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction drives profit. <\/p>\n

So, the simple statement that this post is trying to make: if you start something, finish it. Don’t let anybody distract you whilst you are completing (working on) the task, try and set aside a suitable chunk of time that is free from interruptions. Remember, the shorter the duration [of the task] the more accurate your estimate of time to complete it going to be. If you have to, break longer tasks, e.g. longer than 2 hours, into smaller more manageable tasks. Of course, you may need to remind folks that it is your schedule, not theirs, and that contrary to common belief you won’t drop everything to work on their problem.<\/p>\n

In this series:<\/strong>
\nPM#11 \u2013 Management By Shouting Loudest (MSBL)<\/a>
\nPM#10 \u2013 The truth is best\u2026admit it\u2026<\/a>
\nPM#9 \u2013 Avoid duplication of effort<\/a>
\nPM#8 \u2013 Multi-tasking is evil<\/a>
\nPM#7 \u2013 High workload means lower productivity\u2026<\/a>
\nPM#6 \u2013 You were right and I was wrong<\/a>
\nPM#5 – Whose schedule is it anyway?<\/a>
\nPM#4 – Start it\u2026finish it<\/a>
\nPM#3 – Use e-mail properly<\/a>
\nPM#2 – Focus on the project<\/a>
\nPM#1 – decision making<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you start a task that you believe can be completed in one sitting, don’t let anybody stop you from completing it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,5],"tags":[59,57,58,56],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pm","category-project-management","tag-belbin","tag-completer-finisher","tag-dr-meredith-belbin","tag-starter-finisher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1947,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/1947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}